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Regardless of company size or industry, organisations all face challenges when it comes to customer experience, the growing number of customer contact channels and the pressures of omnichannel engagement.

London, UK (PRWEB)June 30, 2015

Creative Virtual, a world leader in self-service customer engagement solutions, today released the findings of its second survey on customer support challenges in the global market. The survey serves as a follow-up to the first survey conducted in 2013 and solicited feedback from customer support professionals to understand their goals, challenges and strategies for increasing customer engagement and creating more personalised customer experiences.

The report, titled '2015 Global Customer Support Outlook Survey', explores the role traditional contact channels play in the world of customer experience, as well as how mobile, social media and virtual assistant technology have gained momentum in organisations that wish to provide anywhere, anytime customer service. The report also provides invaluable feedback on how to create more efficient processes that facilitate knowledge management, information sharing and intelligent customer interactions in an omnichannel environment.

“Regardless of company size or industry, organisations all face challenges when it comes to customer experience, the growing number of customer contact channels and the pressures of omnichannel engagement,” says Chris Ezekiel, Founder & CEO of Creative Virtual. “The results of this survey provide an insightful look into the disconnect between customer support goals and budgets, the tools and strategies organisations are implementing to meet customer demands and what priorities companies are setting for their customer experience programmes.”

With customer experience increasingly becoming a key competitive differentiator, a majority of survey participants from both EMEA and the Americas rated improving their overall customer experience as extremely important when presented with a list of common challenges. The top five customer experience challenges for EMEA are:

Improve the overall customer experience (60%)

Resolve customer inquiries faster (42%)

Increase usage of self-service channels (38%)

Obtain better data for measuring customer satisfaction (37%)

Improve customer engagement (35%)

Responses from the Americas varied slightly, with the top five customer experience challenges being:

Improve the overall customer experience (74%)

Improve customer engagement (52%)

Resolve customer inquiries faster (51%)

Obtain better data for measuring customer satisfaction (41%)

Reduce call and chat volumes to live agents (39%)

Most organisations surveyed also reported facing challenges when trying to manage and deliver relevant content to customers across a growing number of contact channels, including mobile and social media. The top three factors affecting content and knowledge management for EMEA are:

Creating and maintaining consistent information in one system across the organisation (62%)

Cost savings and productivity improvement across the department (53%)

Overall ROI of the solution (51%)

In the Americas, organisations face similar barriers but with the ease of use and support replacing overall ROI:

Creating and maintaining consistent information in one system across the organisation (53%)

Cost savings and productivity improvement across the department (51%)

Ease of use and support (49%)

The results of the survey also indicate that organisations are addressing the growing demand from customers for anytime, anywhere support through the implementation and improvement of self-help tools. In particular, 56% of EMEA respondents either currently use virtual assistant technology or plan to deploy these solutions in 2015. For the Americas, 38% of survey participants are currently using or plan to use virtual assistant technology this year to provide customer support.

To determine the customer support outlook for 2015, Creative Virtual surveyed 221 respondents representing organisations worldwide via an online questionnaire fielded between March 2015 and April 2015. The complete results can be downloaded here.

ABOUT CREATIVE VIRTUAL

Creative Virtual is a world leader in self-service customer engagement solutions with global organisations, including HSBC, Verizon, Chase, Lloyds Banking Group, InterContinental Hotels Group, Autodesk and Tesco, relying on our technology to improve their customer support experience, increase sales, reduce costs and build brand loyalty. Since 2004, Creative Virtual has built award-winning, critically-acclaimed technologies in knowledge management, natural language processing and virtual assistants to deliver businesses with omnichannel Smart Help tools. Backed by an experienced, expert team and our innovative knowledge management, workflow management and business intelligence reporting platform, our solutions empower brands to provide customers with consistent, accurate, personalised and seamless engagement across web, mobile, social, SMS, contact centre and IVR channels. Delivering call deflection of up to 50% and increased first contact resolution, our platform is the most compelling self-service product in the world today.